


The life I chose

by Ilrona



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: And you will die too, Grief/Mourning, M/M, My first fic was a happy Kylux future fic, This is the opposite of that fic, This poor mess of a family, When you kill your dad then later mom kills your boyfriend
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-07-26
Updated: 2016-07-26
Packaged: 2018-07-26 23:01:17
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7593757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ilrona/pseuds/Ilrona
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After the victory of the Resistance, Kylo Ren thinks about his life in his prison cell while he waits for his execution. It feels like nothing really matters, now that soon everything will be over. Leia comes to talk with her son one last time, and shows him a holographic message from Hux, addressed to Kylo but never sent to him, found in Hux’s belongings after Leia killed him.</p>
            </blockquote>





	The life I chose

**Author's Note:**

> This fic is sort of similar to [this one](http://archiveofourown.org/works/7456008) (though this can be absolutely understood without reading the other fic), because both have one half of Kylux confronting a parent. I just love how different expectations and results Leia and Brendol had with their sons.
> 
> Title is from the lyrics of ‘Dear Fellow Traveler' by Sea Wolf. This is my third fic with a title from the same song. At least it's a pretty song.

The cell is empty, except for Kylo, a bed and a small metal chair. The walls are unadorned white expanses; even the barren planet of Starkiller Base did not have plains so devoid of anything. There isn’t even some grey mold clinging onto the wall. If there's a cam somewhere, he can't see it. The blanket is white, clean. There is no pillow. The bed is too small for him: if he stretches his legs, his feet dangle above nothing. Instead, his knees are raised now, his feet on the mattress.

Kylo doesn’t remember ever feeling this calm. He feels calm not because there’s nothing to be upset about, but because every single thing he should feel upset about seems as if it exists somewhere very far away, in a different galaxy. Kylo floats above everything. Nothing can reach him anymore.

Maybe this is the last gift of the Force, even though Kylo can’t use it anymore. If it is, Kylo is grateful.

There is, somewhere, the Dark and the Light, the First Order and the Resistance, but Kylo doesn’t belong to any of them now.

No. The Dark and the Light are eternal, but there is no First Order anymore. There is still a Resistance, but not for long. Once they destroy the last stray ships of the First Order and clean up the remaining wreckage from the war, they will probably step aside and dissolve themselves without any fuss. And then will come the time of the Republic, again. Like what happened to the Rebellion more than three decades ago. It was, after all, in their very name: Alliance to Restore the Republic.

Kylo remembers being a child, clutching a toy X-wing in his hand, running around and giggling wildly. His mother was sitting on the floor, reaching for him with her hands, trying to coax him to sit near her. She wanted to explain to him history and politics, the Senate and the tyrant Empire and why the Republic had to return. But little Ben did not care about that boring stuff when he could instead imagine that he could blow the enemy fighters into pieces with his mighty proton torpedoes.

Kylo doesn’t try to banish the memory into a dark abyss of his mind like he used to. The memory also doesn’t awaken in him a desperate yearning to be able to come back to those simpler, easier times.

Now this is only a memory, a thing that happened a long time ago. It feels like it happened to another person, though Kylo doesn’t try to convince himself anymore that he wasn’t, once upon a time, Ben Organa-Solo. He was. And it doesn’t matter anymore. Very soon, he won't be Kylo Ren or Ben Organa-Solo or anyone else.

Later, his mother comes into his cell. She’s alone. She’s so small, but she wears strength and power like a uniform on her body.

Looking at his father on Starkiller – seeing him for the first time in so many years, seeing him for the last time –, Kylo felt pity. Han Solo reminded him of Lor San Tekka: poor old men who used to be useful, but are now nothing but a husk of their younger and better selves. Both cut down by Kylo’s lightsaber without any fight: an ignoble, unheroic death.

His mother doesn’t make him feel pity. He’s, instead, half-awed, half-afraid.

Though, to be fair to his father (now that he’s floating above everything and nothing can truly reach him anymore, he allows himself even that), the two situations are quite different. When Kylo killed his father, the last echoes of the destruction of the New Republic and the deaths of billions still occasionally made the Force shiver around him. The First Order was more powerful than anything else in the galaxy, and Kylo was ready and eager to do anything to become even stronger with Snoke’s guidance.

Now, the First Order is dead, Snoke is dead, Hux is dead, and there’s nothing but death left for Kylo. Of course, robbed of everything that has ever made him feel powerful, he’s afraid of the victorious leader of the Resistance.

Kylo doesn’t get off the bed, but he does sit up, not wanting to look even more vulnerable lying. Of course, with the Force suppression collar around his neck, there isn’t much he can do to protect himself, though he could, perhaps, break his mother’s neck with only the strength of the muscles in his arms. Only if no guards come to defend her, and only if she would allow him to kill her – which he doubts very much.

Leia sits down onto the one small metal chair, her hands falling into her lap. She doesn’t have a blaster at her hip, but she still has the Force, and Kylo doesn’t. She is the general of the victors, and he used to be one of the commanders of the defeated side. She has the upper hand here.

“What should I do, Ben?”

The name doesn’t make him feel much else but a mild uncomfortable sensation in his stomach. He looks at her. Her face is emotionless now. The only thing he finds in her eyes is weariness. Maybe she feels as numb and outside of everything as he does.

“I will be executed, General Organa. Surely it has already been decided, with all my war crimes. Even if that’s not what you want, I know there are too many other voices demanding my death. I don’t know why you are asking me, obviously whatever I say won’t matter. My fate is out of my hands.”

Leia, to Kylo’s great relief, doesn’t try to convince him that this is not the only possibility.

“Hux,” Kylo says. “The guards said you were the one who killed him. Is that true?”

Leia hesitates, but only for a moment.

“Yes.” She sighs. Her fingers flex in her lap, like she’s agitated. “Though I wasn’t aware that you were in a relationship when I killed him.”

This startles a strange-sounding laugh out of Kylo. He feels almost embarrassed by it, like that time he couldn’t stop hiccupping in some serious gala with several Senate members laughing at him for making these stupid noises he had no control over. The memory is biased, of course: they probably weren’t mean, just strangers who found little Ben’s hiccups cute and funny. “As if that would have stopped you from killing him!”

“No, but I wanted to make it clear that when I killed him, I did it because of the Hosnian system and the stolen stormtroopers and all the other atrocities, and it had nothing to do with my son’s relationship with him, or the fact that my son was also the one who killed my husband. If it was revenge, it was revenge for all the many billion beings dead and suffering, and not for any personal reason.”

“And how do you even know about it?” Kylo asks. He can’t imagine that Hux told her while he was dying.

“He didn’t tell me anything,” Leia tells him. Kylo flinches. Did she just read his thoughts? “I found this, later, among his belongings.”

She takes out of the huge pocket of her vest a small holoprojector. It remains in her hand as she turns it on. An image of Hux sitting somewhere springs into the air, his surroundings not seen. His red hair is unruly, like it always used to look when he just woke up after spending the night rolling around in their bed, captured by his nightmares. He is wearing an outfit that looks like pajamas, though not the simple dark clothes he used to wear on the Finalizer. Instead, these are pale green with golden buttons and there’s some fancy embroidery on his chest. It's… certainly different.

“You must think I look ridiculous,” Hux says, as if he too just read Kylo’s thoughts. “But this is what the hotel gave me. Don’t you dare tell anyone about this! Consider this a great privilege, that you and no one else can see me like this, Ren! Everyone else must think I was born in my uniform, and that I will die in it.”

Hux rubs his eyes, closing them. Kylo wants to lean closer to Hux – to his mother – when they open again, to check the exact color of those eyes, but the hologram, though good quality, is small, and can’t show every little detail. He wants Hux to look at him, but this Hux can’t see Kylo, though he’s talking to him. Hux will never see Kylo again.

“I don’t even know why I’m doing this, Ren,” Hux admits. “But perhaps I will send this to you. It would make me feel better, I think, if you could give me a comforting answer. I woke up from a nightmare. I dreamed that I was dead. And you were sitting in your shuttle, Mitaka was there too, and he told you about my death, and the poor guy was trembling so much, so terrified of you, afraid that in your grief you will crush his neck.”

The Hux in the hologram laughs, just a little, just for a moment, but it’s enough for Kylo to feel like his heart is stabbed with a lightsaber. He think he could count the number of times he had seen Hux laugh on one hand, and it’s so unfair that he would laugh once again now that he’s already dead, taunting Kylo _: look what you had, look, it’s gone forever._

He’s not floating above everything anymore, he’s not outside of the galaxy. As he stares at Hux, no longer laughing, Kylo realizes: he’s  _here_  once again, and things matter again, or at least Hux’s death matters.

Hux goes on. “But you just nodded, and you had no helmet, but there was no emotion on your face.” Maybe Hux swallows now, it’s hard to see on the small hologram. “You said something about how you’re beyond all emotions now, that only the Force matters, and that if I was too weak to survive that’s my problem, and you have nothing to do with it.”

“That’s not true!” Kylo stands up suddenly, starts to reach for the holoprojector in Leia’s hand before he quickly stops his arm, making it instead hover awkwardly, embarrassingly in the air. He takes a deep breath, and his arm falls to his side. "I care that you died!”

He’s talking to Hux, but Leia is the only one who hears him. When he looks at her, her eyes are wide. Her lips twitch as if she wants to smile, but then she doesn’t.

The hologram is silent, unmoving now. “There's more, right?” Kylo asks, wanting to hear more, not wanting to hear more.

“I stopped it, but yes, there’s a little more.”

Kylo sits back onto the bed, then nods. The Hux in the hologram continues speaking.

“I try to remind myself how much it hurt you when you killed your father. How you were crying in the medbay so desperately, blabbering all sort of nonsense. I thought you were pathetic and weak, but now these memories give me hope that you would care about my death too. It’s just that – Snoke said he will train you, and what if when we meet again after your training is completely finished you won’t care about me, you won’t love me even a little bit, you won’t even recognize me…” Hux rubs his eyes again, and it’s impossible to see whether it’s because he’s tired, or because his eyes are filled with tears.

Then he straightens his back and shakes his head, as if he wants to shake something out of it. His voice is as hard as when shouting orders. “That was very embarrassing. How awful that a simple bad dream can reduce even someone like me to a pathetic mess like this! I have to destroy this message before anyone finds it.”

Then the image disappears, the air above the little holoprojector empty.

“There must be more!” Kylo gasps, feeling as desperate as a starving man begging for food.

Leia smiles at him with sadness, and shakes her head. Oh. At least it wasn't destroyed.

“I’m glad, if there’s nothing else, that at least you cried because of Han, and that you are crying now because of  _him_. Who could have ever imagined that I would be afraid of the same thing as General Hux? But it’s good that, despite everything, you are still capable of feeling something, Ben.”

He really is crying, Kylo realizes as he touches his eye cautiously with the tip of his finger, like he’s worried the tear could sear his skin.

“Did it feel like a sudden hole in your chest for you too?” Kylo asks, furiously trying to get the tears out of his eyes. “When I killed father? Did it feel as bad as it felt for me when you killed Hux?”

There’s anger in Leia’s eyes. “Did you had three decades and a child with him? Because if not, I don’t understand how you even dare to compare us. And we should also not ignore that Han, unlike your boyfriend, didn’t destroy five planets. His only crime was that he wanted his son – who was also my son – to come home. That’s the only reason he had to die.”

“You think we didn’t want three decades and a child as well? And we could have done it a lot better than you! You weren’t even together in the end, were you? And your child, well, wasn’t exactly the best for you, was I? With Hux, if we could have created our Empire, he would have been the Emperor and I would have been his protector, and I never would have let him die if I could have always been at his side, and our heir would have never turned against us, because we could have given them everything!”

“You would have wanted to protect  _him_ , Ben? I would have killed you a thousand times before I let your planet-destroying general sit on the throne of the galaxy even for one minute!”

Kylo laughs in half-crazed delight. He stands up and walks to his mother, grasping her shoulders and pulling her up from her chair, shaking her. For the first time since walking into his cell, she looks afraid of him.

“Mother!” Kylo exclaims. He wonders if he’s going mad – but it doesn’t matter, he will be dead in a few days. “You have always been so much stronger than father or Uncle Luke or anyone else I have ever met – well, except for Hux and Snoke, of course. Yes, you would kill me, your own son, because you think that would save others! Your husband couldn’t even save himself from me! Your brother run away like the coward he is! But not you: you stayed, you fought, you survived me and everything else, and you won! You are a wonder! I’m so glad that Hux was killed by a worthy adversary, if he had to die! Even Hux liked you, you know? Well, he absolutely loathed you, but he said once that you were the only one in the whole New Republic who had any common sense, because you opposed the Military Disarmament Act and you lead the Resistance and you never underestimate your enemies. Oh, mother!”

He lets go of Leia, turning away, once the outburst is done. He wishes he could stare at something, but there’s nothing in the room he can focus on.

“Could we have done something differently? Would you have remained with us then, Ben?”

Kylo laughs again. This time he sounds less crazy, and more mocking.

“There is not one thing in the galaxy that would be the same if someone, somewhere, in the right moment, did something differently! You  _could_ have kept me, saved Han Solo, saved the Hosnian system! It  _could_  have happened, somehow, sure! Why not go back? You could have saved Alderaan, too! Not you, but someone else could have stopped grandfather from turning to the Dark! Could have stopped Palpatine from becoming the Emperor! What a stupid question, mother!” Kylo feels a lonely new tear roll down his cheek. Silently, only in his mind, he continues the list: He could have saved Hux, or he could have ignored Snoke and then he would likely have never met Hux, or Hux could have died when he was a child… So many things that  _could_  have happened. But only some things actually happen.

“Is there anything else you want to discuss with me?” Kylo asks then, once he understands Leia doesn’t want to say anything.

When he looks at her again, she’s crying too. With her tear-wet face she looks, somehow, both very young, like a heartbroken child, and infinitely old, as if she were some mystical being who has to hold every pain of the galaxy on her shoulders and it hurts her a lot.

She takes a step forward, as if she wants to hug him, or kiss his cheeks, or touch him somehow. But then she simply holds the holoprojector out towards him. Kylo takes it from her.

“Thank you,” he says.

“I wish so many things hadn’t happened,” Leia whispers. She looks at her son, like she’s waiting for something. One last apology, maybe:  _I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to._  But Kylo did mean to. He didn’t want to make Leia and so many others suffer, but he knew they would, and he still continued to walk this path. Of course, he didn’t want everything to end like this, Hux dead and Kylo in a cell waiting for his execution, but he will take responsibility for choosing Snoke, the dark side of the Force, the First Order, Hux. Kylo remains silent.

Leia leaves.

And Kylo realizes he should have asked her about how Hux died. A blaster bolt through his chest – that’s all Kylo knows. Did he fight valiantly before? Did he want to run, instead? Surely not – not Hux. Did he think about Kylo, when he was dying? A blaster bolt in the chest can kill instantly – maybe he died before he even realized it. Maybe there was no time for fear or anger or regret or anything else before everything was over.

Kylo half-wishes he could have died instantly too. So he wouldn’t have to think about anything now. He lies back onto his bed, and starts the hologram again.  

He understands that this is not how his life should have gone, and not how it should have ended, that he was meant for so much more, but he doesn’t know what exactly he should have done differently. He could have become a Jedi Master, adored by his family. He could have become the strongest user of the Dark Force, adored by Emperor Hux. He would have preferred to walk the second path, Kylo thinks.

He could have – he didn’t.

For once in his life, he allows all kinds of memories to flow into his mind, not trying to erase the unwanted ones. At the end of his life, no memory is unwanted, because what does the past truly matter if he has no future left? He thinks about his mother laughing as he was trying to dance with his little child’s feet on his father’s feet in the Millennium Falcon. Sitting on Uncle Chewie’s shoulders as the fireworks lit up the dark sky of Hosnian Prime. The look of pride lighting up Uncle Luke’s face when Ben used the Force to levitate three full glasses without spilling even one drop of blue milk.

The look of pride on Snoke’s face when Kylo gave him the Sith holocron. The joy of well-deserved rest with the other knights after a successful mission. Hearing the awed whispers of First Order officers:  _They say he’s just as strong as Darth Vader, if not even stronger._

He looks at the hologram, and thinks about Hux. Brilliant, cruel, ambitious, amazing Hux; Kylo has never met anymore more dedicated to a cause. How much more he could have achieved, especially with Kylo! How handsome he was, always proud in his uniform. Even in the strange pajama he’s wearing in the hologram, he looks lovelier than anyone else could ever look.

When the hologram ends, Kylo starts it again. When he closes his eyes, listening to Hux’s words, he can almost fool himself into believing that Hux is there with him in the cell. Or, rather, that they are both in that hotel room. Hux climbs into his lap, and as Kylo caresses the embroidery on his chest with his fingers, he leans closer to whisper into Kylo’s ear:  _Consider this a great privilege, that you and no one else can see me like this, Ren!_

After a while, that strange, numb calm descends onto him again. He understands that the Force is eternal – and he is not. And it’s fine. He had the life he had, and there’s nothing else left to do.

In that too small bed in that empty cell, Kylo Ren falls asleep.


End file.
